Tag: japanese

Another letter I found regarding my early time in Japan. I’m not so sure that I ever sent this one either. I think they both were intended as drafts, but time kept passing and more kept happening, making me want to add even more… and so I never sent anything. 😛

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The short version (A Recount in Which I Cut Out the Complaints)

I live in Toride, Japan, a suburb of Tokyo, and have an apartment, with about 2/3 of what I need in it (a significant improvement from a couple days ago).

Figuring out how to sort trash took a week, but I mostly figured it out with the help of a Japanese friend I made.

I have a new phone and new bicycle (new to me, at least). Both were killer expensive. It’s a 45-minute ride to my main school, 10 to my secondary school.

We aren’t paid until the 21st each month, so I had to bring a boatload of cash for my apartment and initial expenses (apparently credit cards are only used in half the locations the US and Europe use them. Also, bank cards have single-transaction price limits, so everyone always asks if I want to split my transaction when I use my card. (Not that I understand it, but someone translated it once, and I recognize the phrasing + body language now.)

I have a futon, which is a lame version of a mattress, but practical for the lifestyle here (supposed to hang it in the sun every week to kill germs on it, which is usually needed, because it’s hella-hot, and most people don’t really use A/C, even if they have it), and mine seems to be okay-ish for being able to sleep.

A new friend, Sammi, and I talk every evening/afternoon/night just to check in on one another, and to help each other out with whatever questions we’ve each developed about how to function living here (she lives on a little island and is the token white girl foreigner). And also just to chat about whatever. Calls are always free to receive, but dialing out costs after 5 minutes, so we go back and forth setting a timer, and hanging up and redialing every 4 minutes 45 seconds.

I have almost nothing to do at school, but my school requires me to be here. My whole curriculum is written up for the year, and I am only an assistant in class… so my job is essentially to be present in class, and help in class. Not spend August preparing for classes. A drastic difference from what I used to do as a teacher! So I spend my day working on Japanese, and finding ways not to fall asleep at my desk. I’m not always successful.

The sun comes up around 5am. I wake up with it, despite the curtains and my eye covering.

I’ve made four good friends who are part of my program, and one Japanese friend, who is a friend of a coworker of one of those four US friends. The — (my program) people are Jon(athan), Katarina, Sam(uel), and Sammi. Japanese friend is Rie (ree from reed + saying the letter “a”). Distances from me: Jon/Rie 25 minutes, Katarina 40 minutes (Tokyo), Sam 2 hours (on the beach), Sammi no clue (she’s on a far-away island).

I’m kind of sick of sushi, but that’s probably just because it’s all I had from 7/11 for several days while I had to wait for my predecessor to give me things she had for me for my apartment (fridge, dishes, etc.)

Sammi is my shopping buddy – we talk on the phone, and she helps send me pictures of things she was given, so that I can find them in the incomprehensible store (e.g. this is a photo of my dish soap, I think… look for the words…). We both enjoy the adventure of it.

Speaking of the store, the bicycle parking area looks loads like a car parking lot. And it’s used, too.

I experience my first earthquake last night. It was a 4.6, and I was scared out of my whits. I was on the phone with Sam when it happened. I said, “Is that… I think that’s an earthquake,” and then couldn’t even talk, as I lost the ability somehow. I was quite shocked at how I responded – I knew logically that it was a tiny earthquake, nothing to cause concern. Yet my body and emotions went psycho-freakout on me, and I even cried when it ended 30 seconds later. Sam asked if I was okay when it stopped, and all I could say was just, “Give me a minute,” and then could finally function again after I cried. Totally weird, but I’m glad I had that emotional support for my first one.*

*There actually was one last Wednesday night – a 5.4, I think – , but I was dead asleep in my hotel room, so didn’t notice it. So this was my second earthquake, but the first one of which I was aware as it happened.

Okay, I think that encompasses plenty, though definitely not the whole. Send inquiries my way. ;P Love you all!!

I am years into having a smartphone, and my most visited webpages remain almost exactly the same as when I started using one. They are translation websites and dictionary websites. Originally, it was wordreference.com and dictionary.com. Wordreference.com was an easy one, because I had already done the research for my preferred translator for French, Spanish, and German. But, after some research into different dictionary websites, I found that I preferred merriam-webster.com over dictionary.com. So, today, my most visited webpages are wordreference.com and merriam-webster.com. (I would add in Google Translate, because of my constant use with Japanese on it for kanji translations and photo translations, but I had to download the app almost immediately, when I moved to Japan, so that I could use it almost constantly to understand things around me. Therefore, it isn’t a website I’m visiting, but an application I am using.)

I’m just a word and language nerd. It’s like that day at work, earlier this year, when I spent an hour looking up information on certain punctuation marks – I am a word nerd, and there is ample evidence to support the claim.

This evening, by a wonderful unfolding of events, I ended up having tea with my best friend’s little sister. As my best friend’s little sister, she holds a sweet spot in my heart. What’s more, the fact that she’s the first person I’ve seen go from little kid, singing nursery-rhyme-type songs, to a mature young adult (and soon full-blown adult), makes that spot even sweeter.

As we sat in the tapioca teahouse, drinking our warm (Taiwanese style, I think – at least, that’s what a friend of mine saw constantly while in Taiwan, and which we haven’t seen much elsewhere) bubble tea, our attention somehow turned to the menu on the wall. Naturally, we hadn’t thought anything special of it when we actually were looking at the menu to order earlier on, but it was suddenly relevant to our conversation, so our attention turned to it. She is studying Mandarin this year (since August), and I’ve just moved here from Japan. So, we have some common ground on understanding Chinese characters. (For those who don’t know, Japanese kind of stole the characters from Chinese, and adapted them a bit, so loads of them look exactly or almost exactly the same and have the same or very similar meanings.)

We joyfully pointed out that “ice” was on the end of each name in the ‘Snowy Drink’ category, and that “little” was next to one other character on the “Snacks” sections – likely ‘little meal’ or ‘little food’. Something like that. And then we discussed how we were scouring the menu, picking out little pieces that we understood. It was like a fun little puzzle that we were putting together, piece by piece… one that we know will take months, even years, but the timing of which doesn’t seem to bother us in the slightest. We’re just excited that we’re able to make the little sense of it all that we already can. And we aren’t even using the same language to do it, technically, making it simultaneously that much sillier and that much more awesome.

So, we got to enjoy one another’s company and be nerdy language-lovers together, while sipping warm asian versions of English tea (Earl Grey) on a cold, cold night (for Houston, anyway). Blessings abound when open our minds and schedules to them, it seems. And I am grateful for this one in particular. 🙂

My task for today (from my tea advent calendar) was to listen to a Christmas song in every language I speak. Seeing as how it was likely to be difficult to find a song other than “Jingle Bells” (which is definitely not one of my favorites on repeat) in a bunch of different languages, and taking into account that it could get quite boring, listening to the same song over and over again, I chose to interpret the assignment as being any Christmas song for any of the languages (i.e. different songs for each language, as opposed to the same one in each language). These are the songs I picked.

German: Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
(It was originally written in German. I love the version by John Denver and the Muppets on their joint Christmas album.)

French: Minuit Chrétiens
(One of my favorite Christmas songs, and it was originally in French. This isn’t my favorite version, but it’s still nice.)

Japanese: All I Want for Christmas is You Japanese cover
(Clearly not originally Japanese, but I like it anyway, so I listened to it. I loved the ridiculous Christmas music I would hear in the shops while living in Japan, but I can’t remember any of it. This one does justice to some of the better covers I heard, though.) 😀

English: Mary, did you know?
I first remember hearing this song at Mass at my aunt’s Church in a small town in Texas. A boy around my age sang the song during Mass, I believe during the meditation time following Communion (when everyone goes up to the front and takes some bread and wine). I thought it was magical, hearing this twangy-accented high schooler sing his heart out with these words and notes. This version reminds me of a grown-up version of that first one I remember hearing.

Spanish: Los Peces en el Rio
(I’d never heard this one, but I love it. It is originally in Spanish, and also quite popular as a Christmas song in Spanish-speaking cultures.)*

Seeing as I don’t speak any others fluently or conversationally, I didn’t do them – this took some time and consideration as it was! But it was totally good. Just made me want to listen to loads more in each of the languages, really. Also, I totally forgot about English and Spanish songs until after I thought I was already finished with this task. Whoops. 😛

*If you want some awesome, quality, unoffensive music in Spanish, check out this song. Be prepared to be a little shocked when you see the artists performing, and how strongly it contrasts to the sound of the music. It rocks. Try listening to it without seeing the video for a minute or two. Enjoy!

In college, I spent a summer studying in Germany. It was a language school setup, filled with foreigners, but in such a small town that everyone knew that we were studying German, and so everyone always spoke to us all in German. I had already studied abroad a few times before this adventure, and I had learned firsthand about what works and what doesn’t work, in terms of language immersion. I was dedicated to learning German, and so I made sure that I only spoke in German with others, even if they spoke to me in English. This made friendships hard among the people in my program’s group, since they all used English together; I came across a bit snobby, but I was just really committed to learning German.

I made friends with other foreigners rather easily, though, and especially ones in higher levels of German, which was even better for me. My German was improving immensely. But this led to a unique situation one day.

One day, near the end of either my time at the school or my friend Paul’s time there (he’s British), I found myself faced with a desperate Paul, actually begging me to speak English. Why?! was my repeated question to his pleas.

“Because I want to hear what you sound like!”

I don’t know if he was pleased or not by how I sound in English, but I spoke a little for him. And it was way weird, using English with him, despite the fact that I’d heard him speak English loads, and that it’s our common native language. I had just never used it with him.

And then this brought up a unique and interesting sentiment. He wanted to hear me, and that meant speaking English. I can guess that my native tongue was the one in which Paul believed my identity to lie. I know that it felt like I was setting aside a sort of mask when I switched to English with him. I even felt a little called-out… as though I had been hiding somehow, and it had been behind German. The real me (I) lay in English, in the English part of me.

Yet, years later, here I am, missing the parts of me that belong to these different languages in which I have lived. A part of me, true me (I), exists only on German, and others in French, in Spanish, and in Japanese. So much so that the real me (I) is this whole combination of languages – I feel a huge emptiness and feel not myself when I am using only English in my daily life. I listen to Spanish-speaking radio when I’m in Houston, mostly because I don’t get to use Spanish often enough. I read every night in French, and trade off an English book for a German one at times for my evening reading, too. I regularly pull out a Spanish book to read, or my German audiobooks. And I have noticed that I have been searching for a tolerably satisfying way to have Japanese in my near-daily life, too. (For now, it has just been the occasional music, and a perpetual repeat of a certain song being stuck in my head.) When I don’t have them all, it is as though a part of me is missing, and suddenly getting to speak with someone in them, almost reminds me of that mask I was setting aside in Germany with Paul… like I am again setting aside some mask I have been wearing.

Perhaps it is now a mask of monolingualism, pretending that I only speak English, while I long for the world to talk to me in several languages, all the time.

Anyway… I’m exhausted. And I miss Paul. He was studying opera, and was a really great guy. I wonder if he’s been really successful with opera these past several years. Maybe I can go see him perform one day. That would be awesome. 🙂

I read books in the movie theatre. It’s true. I really do. Not during the film, of course, but beforehand, and sometimes even during previews.

It all started when a friend of my dad’s gave me a book called Staying Alive in Year Five. I think it might be an Australian book. Whatever its origin, I loved reading the book. I remember being so excited to see what happened next that I took it with me everywhere, so I could read whenever I had the chance.

This, naturally, included the movie theatre. We always get to the film early in order to get good seats, and then the movie itself never starts at the specified time, anyway. So, I sat down in my seat by my family members, and I opened up my book and read. I was excited for the film, but I was also disappointed at having to stop reading, when it got to the beginning of the film.

Nowadays, I still read before a movie, if I’m there at all, of course. There hasn’t been much to spark my interest lately, so I haven’t often been at the cinema. And Japan was different, simply because I wanted to learn as much Japanese and Japanese culture as I could, so I watched all the previews and everything rather avidly. Aside from those specific circumstances, I read. I almost always have a book with me. Living in Japan meant that I ended up always having my Kindle, since hard copies of books in not Japanese weren’t so easy to come by. I would read at work, on the train, and at home. While walking around (once I bought earphones I could wear again [Thanks, Korea!]), I listened to audiobooks. Occasionally, I listened to music, but typically not. I just love books.